Thursday, December 16, 2010

Day 1 at FOSS.IN/2010 (and maybe some of Day 2)

(Yes, I am blogging after a long time.)

And I am blogging about FOSS.IN, Day - 1, while I am almost halfway though Day 2. Well that I because I am now sitting through Aditya Patwari's talk on Fedora Student's Contributing a.k.a Fedora Summer Coding, and waiting for my talk which would start soon. Yes, I am nervous, as I always am before my talks, and I wanted to do something to take the pressure off. ;-)

(Aditya is a surprisingly good speaker.)

Coming back to yesterday, I was sick. I took some medicines in the morning which kept me going through the day and I did enjoy a lot yesterday. I went in and met old friends from last FOSS.IN, and Ramkumar with his huge desktop-like-laptop with the heavy-expensive-doubleUSB-nonprinted-keyboard. With a cup of coffee we went to attend the talks.

(I see people leaving.)

Kishore Bhargava kicked-off with the opening ceremony (read lighting of diyas). Danese Cooper had her keynote on Wikipedia technologies. She started off with "Wikipedia != WikiLeaks". The talk was a good insight into the tools and practices that wikipedia uses to manage its backend. I took a few notes, for later reading.

(Arun SAG is telling the audience how to package emacs plugins. Arun is an engaging speaker.)

I had lunch. The queue was long, for the lunch and outside the men's. I had less food because I wasn't well. After lunch I went into Balbir Singh's talk on Operating System Caches in a Virtualised Environment. I wasn't very interested in the talk, I was waiting for Lennart's talk on systemd, hear from the horse's mouth. The talk was good (and the confetti dropping from the ceiling), I could understand most of what he was saying, and I even managed to ask a question. ;-)

(The hall always starts getting empty before I am to talk.)

I didn't want to know about hacking LibreOffice. So I spend the hour chatting. Next I went into Philip Tellis's talk on Boomerang, which was a client side JavaScript code that measured latency on the client side and send it back to a central server. The software looked good, but fishy.

(Arun is still going strong with the specfile for emacs-identica plugin)

Rahul had his keynote next about the Failures of Fedora, and I was looking forward to that. It was informative, interesting at parts. After the talk they were starting off with a video interview of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. We the Fedora Public decided to skip that and do a dinner party of our own.

(My talk of Four Seasons of Code is next, and I'm nervous)

The dinner party went good. Food was nice with all the beer (I did not drink) and the drunk brawls about git behaviour with pipes. Back at the hotel it was another war to get the wireless running with one faulty router.

(That's all, Arun is done with his talk, I'll go up now. Bye!)(My talk's over, I'll just add a few links now and submit this.)